That demotion came about because version 10, aka “Corral”, behaved so badly that many users rolled back to version 9.x iXsystems, the company that backs FreeNAS, therefore went back to the drawing board.

What's emerged is a new version of the product, based on FreeBSD 11-STABLE and packing the bhyve hypervisor so that FreeNAS boxen can host virtual machines. The Docker support added to Corral has, however, been parked for now but will appear in a future point release. FreeBSD jails are available for those who like containerised computing.

Also new is compatibility with AWS' S3 object storage service, which means developers working on cloud-native apps can point them at a FreeNAS. There's also integration with messaging tools like Slack or HipChat, so that if the FreeNAS needs to tell a storage admin it's in trouble, they can get the news in the very same window they use for cat videos. Version 11 also allows admins to pick which services start at boot.

A new GUI built on Angular ships with Version 11, but is still in beta.

Chatter in the FreeNAS forums suggests that testers of Version 11's four release candidates found little to complain about. So hopefully the unpleasantness of version 10 was a one-off. ®